73 Fantastic Facts About Celestial Planets and their Moons

Technically, our planet is inside the Sun's atmosphere

2. There is an exoplanet called "COROT-7b" where it rains rocks. Its surface temperature is hot enough to vaporize rock pebbles, condense out of the air and rain down.

3. The planet Venus does not have any tilt, so consequently, it has no seasons and also it is the only planet in our solar system that rotates clockwise.

4. Our moon is bigger than Pluto and some scientists think it's more of a planet in a "double planet" Earth-moon system.

5. Humans could one day colonize other planets with two or even three times Earth’s gravity. However, at 4 times the Earth’s gravity or above, we would no longer be able to sustain sufficient blood flow to the brain.

In 1911, Indian astronomer Venkatesh P. Ketakar suggested the existence of two trans-Neptunian planets which he named Brahma and Vishnu. He calculated the distance for Brahma of 38.95 AU. When Pluto was discovered 19 years later, it had a mean distance of 39.48 AU.

7. If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not have been able to venture into space, at least using current rocket technologies, due to how the fuel requirements for rockets scale. This means we wouldn't be able to land and return from planets(having same density as earth) bigger than Earth with current technology.-

8. We can only see planets up to 13.8 billion light years far because the universe is 13.8 billion light years old.

9. John Couch Adams calculated the existence of Neptune, using mathematics before the planet was ever observed.

10. Europe is building European Extremely Large Telescope that will produce images 15 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope, possibly enabling it to observe Earthlike exoplanets. First light is planned for 2024.

Mira, a dying star zipping through our universe is shedding its matter leaving a tail 13 light-years in length. Each bit of its shed matter may one day grow into a new, individual star and planets of its own.

12. The Greeks had proposed heliocentrism 2000 years before Copernicus: Aristarchus arranged the planets in order of distance from the Sun, concluding that it could not be in orbit around the Earth because a body that large could not orbit a body so small.

13. Astronomers have a good idea of what other planets would smell like based on their atmospheric composition. Venus and Mars would smell like rotten eggs, while Uranus is odorless.

14. There’s enough space between the Earth and the moon to fit in the all the rest of the planets in the solar system.

15. NASA is creating an “interstellar internet”, called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN). It can transmit information through solar storms, solar flares, and even past planets without losing any original data. It successfully sent images to a spacecraft located 20 million miles from earth.

On April Fool's Day, 1976, the BBC convinced many listeners that a special alignment of the planets would temporarily decrease gravity on Earth. Phone lines were flooded with callers who claimed they felt the effects

17. A Catholic bishop named Robert Grosseteste described the birth of the Universe in an explosion and the crystallization of matter to form stars and planets in a set of nested spheres around Earth in 1225 AD, about four centuries before Newton proposed gravity and 7 centuries before the Big Bang theory.

18. In 2012, White House responded to a petition to have a Death Star built by stating that "the Administration does not support blowing up planets" and that it would not fund a weapon "with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship."

19. It snows metal on Venus

20. If each star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second since the Big Bang, they'd only be starting to repeat shuffles now.

In the last 7 years, humanity has discovered 43 potentially habitable planets.

22. 63 Earths can fit inside Uranus

23. Even if a black hole with the same mass as the sun were to replace it, Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now and not get sucked in.

24. Two of the moons in our solar system (Ganymede & Titan) are actually larger than the planet Mercury.

25. If Ganymede wasn’t Jupiter’s moon, it would have to be considered a planet because it's larger than Mercury.